Snapping Pictures of Jupiter
We’re mostly visual observers here at One-Minute Astronomer, but we do get questions about how to take images of celestial objects. And with Jupiter hovering in the southwest sky these days, many readers want to know how to take a decent picture of the clouds, zones, and Great Red Spot of the big planet.
If you’re keen to image Jupiter, I have good news and bad news.
The good news: with digital cameras, it’s easier than ever to capture and process a good planetary image.
The bad news: it’s still a bit trickier than taking snapshots at your cousin’s wedding.
Believe it or not, cheap computer webcams give you one option for planetary and lunar imaging. In the past decade, do-it-yourselfers figured out how to use simple webcams like the Philips ToUcam Pro to take quite stunning images.
You can modify such a webcam to replace the eyepiece in your telescope. Then, with your computer, you turn on the webcam to capture a stream of hundreds or thousands of images in the span of a few seconds or minutes. Then you use a special software package like Registax to automatically select only the best images, the ones least affected by atmospheric turbulence. You can combine the best frames into a single image, and away you go.
At least, that’s the basic idea.
If you’re not into tinkering, there’s a commercial version of these webcams, all ready to go out of the box, and with all the software you need. The Orion StarShoot Solar System Imager works well, and there are other options from Meade and Celestron. If you’re in a hurry to image the moon and planets, this is a no-fuss way to get started.
And there’s another option for taking a good image of Jupiter (and other planets and the moon). If you’ve got a fairly new digital SLR camera or plan to get one soon, you can use the camera’s “Live View” feature (which lets you use the LCD screen as a viewfinder) to capture a stream of images which you then process with readily available software.
The guide by famed astrophotographer Jerry Lodriguss has more details on this technique, and many other ways to take great astrophotos with a DSLR camera. Click here to learn more…
And the best part about using DSLR’s for astrophotography? You can actually use them to take pics of your cousin’s wedding, too.
